Irina was on a hunt of her own. She needed to find Anastasia before Sark did. She wasn't convinced that her friend was dead. Anastasia had disappeared several years after Irina had taken custody of her son, presumably to escape from Lazarey, but she didn't know where, or with whom, or why.
Wells was a classmate of Sark's at boarding school. A rival. Someone at odds with Sark for some reason—what was that? She knew Sark had been a royal—she chuckled at the thought—pain in the ass to his classmates. She'd seen his progress reports. They were invariably the same.
Exemplary pupil. High aptitude but poor attitude. Harbors suspicion and hostility towards peers. Flagrant disregard for authority of teaching staff.
Yes, that was her Julian. He had a lot of his mother in him.
Back to Wells. Who was he working for? If he had killed Anastasia, why? For whom? What good would it do someone like Wells to hunt down a man he'd known 12 years earlier, and kill that man's mother, a woman Sark had barely known?
It had to be fake, the picture Sark had been sent. It was so like Anastasia, the high melodrama of it. Woman strangled to death by a lover; rough play that had gotten out of hand.
Irina tried not to think about Julian with Sydney. She was angry, disappointed at him. He knew she wouldn't approve of his actions, why even tell her? But she was more disappointed in Sydney; her daughter was making the same mistakes she had made. The affair. The secrets. The peculiar penchant for violence. She almost blamed herself for not staying in the US, with Jack, instead running away as it was her duty at the KGB. None of this would've happened.
She picked up the phone in the booth on the corner of the street she'd been walking along, and dialed her contact.
Sark lay on the bed for a long time after Sydney had left him. He dozed until the sun went down. The sting from her nails on his back was beginning to subside.
He almost hoped she would go back to Vaughn, with the bruise on her face, the scrape on her back. He got a cruel, evil pleasure out of causing Vaughn to suffer, he wasn't even sure why. Schadenfreude, the word danced in the back of his mind. It wasn't really sadism, literally; it was more like that good feeling you got when something bad happened to someone, and you knew it was going to happen. Like an "I told you so" type of sensation.
He rolled over and picked up his book where it lay on the end table.
"What do you hate most?" he asks.
"A lie. And you?"
"Ownership," he says. "When you leave me, forget me."
Her fist swings towards him and hits hard into the bone just below his eye. She dresses and leaves.
He wanted to spy on her. He didn't know where she'd gone, though. Maybe he'd go by their house anyway. Check up on Vaughn.
Outside their house, Sark crouched behind a rhododendron bush. This was really not his specialty, this kind of stalker behavior. He considered these tactics to be the province of a desperate man. And he was anything but desperate.
The lights were on and the windows open. He could hear the TV, but couldn't tell what Vaughn was watching. She wasn't there, unsurprisingly. Her car was still missing from the garage.
Cautiously, he straightened up and peered over the ledge of the window. It was their kitchen. Spanish tile countertops, light hanging over the kitchen table. There were bananas in a bowl on the counter, brown and black splotches forming on their hides. He hated bananas, he thought, and tried not to make a face at the very notion of them.
He went low again and slid along to the next window. Bingo. Living room, complete with Agent Vaughn. God, he looked terrible, Sark smirked. Schadenfreude!
Vaughn was sprawled on the couch, in jeans and a Detroit Red Wings shirt. He hadn't shaved. His hair was a mess. Pathetic.
Sark took in the room; it was an amalgam of items he supposed had been Vaughn's, and ones that she had added after she'd come back from the dead. All her things had been destroyed in the fire the Covenant had set after her fight with Allison in the apartment. There was a good sized bookshelf full of books; were they hers? Vaughn didn't strike Sark as the reading type. Franklin's intel on Vaughn had been a waste of funds—not that he was that expensive. Vaughn just didn't do anything interesting; there were no lunchtime visits to titty bars, no call girls while Sydney was out of town, no gambling. He was… what he was. A good guy. Steady, Sark's mind seized on the word, having read it in a Cosmo magazine left behind by some Valley Girl on his flight from England to LA, the kind that some women spend their whole lives looking for. The kind of guy who doesn't have any bad habits that need forgiving or fixing.
Pretty much everything he himself was not, Sark decided.
Just then, a set of headlights swept the yard and Sark dropped to all fours. Was it her coming home?
There was a muted whump of a car door closing inside the garage. So it was her. He heard her enter the house, and the TV went silent. It was nearly killing him not to look, but he refused to act on the urge. Give them a chance to work out whatever it was she had come home for.
But then, to his surprise, he heard the door open and Vaughn said, "You know where I'll be. Call if you need anything."
What was this development? Was Vaughn really leaving her alone in the house?
Sure enough, he heard the garage door open, Vaughn's car back down the driveway, and purr off down the street. Sweet, sweet stupidity, Sark smiled. Leaving your wife alone.
Inside the house, Sydney went straight to the bathroom. She wanted to brush her teeth, they felt like they had… fur.
She was busy making three rotations of the bristles around each of her molars—especially the ones that had been damaged when Suit & Glasses had tortured her, they were prone to decay, the dentist had said--when she glanced up in the mirror. Sark was behind her in the doorway.
She screamed then, spitting a giant blob of toothpaste foam onto the front of her shirt. "What are you doing here?" she shouted, the strongest her voice had been all day.
He shrugged and smiled. "Checking up on you."
"Well…" She couldn't believe he'd come here, into her house. This was breaking and entering. She felt more violated by this than anything he'd done to her in his hotel room. "How'd you get in?"
"Through the door, Sydney," he said, bored. "I wasn't beamed up or anything sexy like that."
"Fuck off," she spit her toothpaste into the sink and rinsed her mouth. "I went by your hotel but you weren't there. How did you know I'd be here?"
"Because," he said, his voice unexpectedly vicious, "You always go back to him."
"Vaughn's not here, in case your super-spy skills hadn't picked up on that," she said bitterly. "He went to Weiss's."
She pushed past him into the master bedroom, where she went into the closet and started pulling out clothes. "I only came back to get my clothes, I can't stay here."
"He's kicked you out, has he?" Sark perched on the edge of the bed—their bed—and looked amused. Damn him. "How predictable of him."
"You! You…" she spluttered, not even knowing what to say. "You can't leave well enough alone. I'm working on getting you what you need."
"Fine."
"Good."
She tossed several pairs of shoes out onto the floor, practical shoes, not heels. She didn't suspect she'd need the dress-up clothes, wherever she were going.
"Oh, Sydney," his voice had a trace of disappointment in it, "I do wish you'd bring those heels, the ones with all the straps. I've rather looked forward to seeing you in them." And nothing else was implied, she decided.
She glanced out of the closet at him. He wanted her to come over to him. She stuck her chin out so that her lower teeth jutted out past her top ones.
"Sark," she said quietly, "Stop it."
"I don't think either of us wants that," he echoed her comment from earlier in the afternoon.
Oh, stupid body, stupid girl body, she cursed herself as she felt delicious prickly heat between her legs at the thought of his body against hers.
He got up off the bed and came into the closet with her. The last thing she saw, before he pulled the string on the light switch and extinguished it, was a pair of Vaughn's dress shoes.
It was stuffy and dark in the closet, but it smelled like her, like her clothes and her perfume. After they'd kissed for what seemed like hours, he reached under her skirt and jerked down her underwear. She gasped a little when he traced his forefinger back and forth against her. He held her around her waist, close to him, and when she tried to arch back, away from his touch, he shoved his two middle fingers as deep into her as he could.
"What do you hate most?" he asks.
"A lie. And you?"
"Ownership," he says.
He had strong hands, but he was trying to be gentle. He knew she was probably sore. Hell, he was sore. He backed her up against the back wall of the closet, his hand insistent between her legs. Her skirt was hiked up around her waist, her panties around one ankle. He wasn't actually that aroused—yet—but he was enjoying watching her. He pressed his thumb against her clit and she moaned against his lips as he made a 'come here' type gesture with his fingers, inside her. Now that he had her, he put his other hand under her shirt, squeezing her nipple between his thumb and his forefinger.
"Sark," she breathed, her head back against the wall and her eyes closed, "We have to stop this."
"Why," he muttered, tugging at her earlobe with his teeth, "Give me one good reason."
"Mmpf…"
"I'm sorry, what?" he whispered.
"Don't stop."
"That's what I thought."
For those celebrating, HAPPY THANKSGIVING:)